At a place such as a data center where a group of many IT devices are set, the environment needs to be kept suitable for the IT devices to operate therein and so-called facility devices including air-conditioners and power supply units are controlled for that purpose. Specifically, an air-conditioner is adjusted to sufficiently cool the IT devices or power is stably supplied to the IT devices. That ensures the stable operation for the IT devices.
The facility devices can include various devices such as an air-conditioner, a power supply unit, a lighting fixture, etc. For efficient management and control of facility devices, control systems have been developed (for example, see Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 10-98778). This reference discloses a building managing system for integrally controlling various facility devices in a building.
As mentioned above, it is important that the facility devices should be suitably controlled in such a place as a data center where many IT devices are set and required to provide stable operation. In case of a system that manages and controls such IT devices and facility devices separately, it is difficult to provide suitable and efficient control for the facility devices. When the system controls an air-conditioner, for example, it tends to cause the air-conditioner to provide too much cool air for the purpose of preventing a server device that keeps operating from heating up to run away or halt. Although the server device should obviously neither run away nor halt, it is inefficient to control the facility devices to provide too much cool air, because such control leads to an unnecessary increase in energy consumption.
On the other hand, a technique has been developed to associate a managing system for a group of IT devices (IT managing system) and a managing system for facility devices (facility managing system) with each other to efficiently control the facility devices. As mentioned above, however, various types of devices are used as the facility device and various types of management are provided by the facility managing system. In addition, there is a quite complicated influential relationship between the respective facility devices and the respective IT devices. For those reasons, it is difficult to associate the IT managing system and the facility managing system each other.